THE NEW YORKER tIme. She had her certificate even be- fore we got married, and our first plans were to settle down in .i\rizona and for her to teach and for me and Burt to run a dude ranch. That was only one of many plans but it was the one we kept coming back to. I'd still like to see my children grow up in .i\rizona. "He was such a wonderful boy," she said. "The most wonderful boy in the world. When other boys chased their little sisters away, somehow he always managed it so I could stick around." A T home, Betty and I got to feeling better. The baby was down for the night, and Mrs. Lehner, from across the road, had Chris and Nina in the bathtub. We paid Mrs. Lehner and let her go. Watching Chris and Nina in the water, we got to feeling better. .i\ny time a man and his wife don't get to feeling better when they see their kids in the tub, they had best head for the nearest divorce court. After we'd hung around the bathroom longer than we should have, Betty read Chris his bed- time story and I sang Nina her bedtime songs, and we had our supper out of the refrigerator. If on the day we got married, less than six years ago, someone had told us we'd have three children, one after the other, I wonder if we would have gone through with it. We'd have been crazy if we hadn't. This is the way we want it, but I don't know if you could have convInced us of that in the summer of '44 I was fresh back in the States with a medical discharge, healthy as a horse except for a trick knee that hasn't given me any real trouble since. I had Betty's address from Burt and looked her up as soon as I could. Five days after we met, I asked her to marry me, and she only took about a week making up her mind. We sent Burt the announcement. He didn't answer, and that was the first we knew that somethIng had gone wrong. I had left him in pretty good shape on Pavuvu, but by the time I reached State- side, they had him in the Navy mobile hospital on Banika. I'd put in a couple of weeks in that hospital myself, with my knee. There were more than fifty thousand men on Banika at that time, and less than a hundred American women-nurses and Red Cross girls, who lived behind a barbed-wire stock- ade and could leave it only under armed M.P. escort. Betty believed me when I told her about the stockade, but she thought I was piling it on a bit about the M.P .s. I've always had a little trouble trying to tell Betty how things were out there, I mean in the order they happened. She has asked me more than once to explain how Burt could have gone through the really rough months on Guadalcanal and then cracked wide open after the short blitz on Cape Gloucester, where our casualties were light, and a few weeks of Pavuvu, which was supposed to be a rest camp. She'll listen to me and look like she understands, and after a while she'll ask the same question again. I guess when you've spent twen- ty years looking up to your big brother, who's tougher and smarter and nicer than anybody else's big brother, it's hard to let go of the idea. Once, she said, "But why didn't you crack? " The answer, which didn't come to me at the time, is that I did. We all did, but some of us managed to keep it to ourselves. The rains came down heavy on Cape Gloucester. The monsoon broke as we landed, the day after Christmas, and from then on we stayed wet through the whole operation, wet to the skin. I don't know how to describe it. The whole jungle turned into muck, from the forest roof down to the swamp un- derfoot. Your equipment would bog down, and while you'd be struggling to get it loose, miles from any J ap, a rot- ten tree would crash and kill the man in front of you. The wallet in your pocket turned bright blue with mold and so did your boondockers. If you had a pencil, it came apart at the seams. The blades of your pocketknife rusted together. Letters and pictures you had carried for a year rotted into a pulp after the first two days. I don't know how to explain it. On Guadalcanal, except for the two lousiest days of naval shelling, vou could fight back at somebody, or at least think about )).' 29 fightIng back. Once in a while, you might get to the rear and take a swim in the Lunga. On Cape Gloucester, our outfit had nothing to fight back at most of the time. I don't say it was worse than Guadalcanal or that I'd rather fight Japs than the humidity. But there's a kind of discouragement that gets to you. You couldn't even smoke your tobacco without getting sick. Burt stood up as well as anybody. Better, I thought. He had a patch of jungle rot in one of his armpits, but we all had something. He and I tried to keep warm at night by sleeping to- gether, with one poncho above us and one below We slept right through some "Condition Red" sirens and talked right through some others I don't remember anything peculiar about his talk He told me a lot about his girl in Melbourne, but not in any peculiar way. He was thinking he might marry her and bring her to the States. That's when we first talked about running a dude ranch. He said his girl could cook for any number of people. The next day, he killed a J ap at long range, with a rifle, one of the cleanest shots I ever saw. Everything I could remember about Burt I've told to one or another of his doctors. They keep asking me about Pavuvu, and I've told them I don't know if they get it when I say we were all of us queer on Pavuvu, more or less. .i\siatic, we called it. .i\fter Gloucester, we had all thought we'd be shipped back to Melbourne, and they sent us to Pavu- vu instead. The way they happened to do that I found out only last year, when we got sent copies of the division history, with a picture of General Vandegrift in fron t. Betty says there is no such place as Pavuvu listed in any dictionary or atlas. Maybe so. But it's a real is1and, all ... .:::: -> 'G Y !t<: '" .. ?, '. /4^ :: '" : '. *' . .. :þ . ') , . "<'" ' 'J\'} ;, , 4, '",: . t' 1>;1':, ., r . . ..',' :' ,"' II&, t ' .... .. ...V',," ': .:'-^' . ....- .r;." :..' ..==:. . ....., *' J'-Þ'>... " , .. . " .' : k, . ,,> . .. :.:-:. "/0 0(0...... " . rJ "",' , .w,. .", ...' . I ..,. :: . '. . ." . .-: ':'0: )":k .. ' '" .1':. 1 ... . ;' ' " "ffi' . S " ' ! , " ø , .... :- b.".' ".. . .. N ..<<c.... ",. . , ' "? '^' !* ' " .